Trees in the Field by J. E. Knowles

Author:J. E. Knowles [Knowles, J. E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Lesbian
ISBN: 9781594932809
Google: eFogYAAACAAJ
Amazon: 1594932808
Publisher: Bella Books
Published: 2012-08-14T02:34:07+00:00

“Is this very urgent, Doctor Jefferson?” Melody said over the phone. “Senator McKeehan’s in the Senate for a vote.”

Would she call if it wasn’t very urgent? “If you could just have her call me back as soon as she can, Melody, thanks,” Tomas said, numerous unnecessary words tumbling out in her haste. “I know she’s very busy. You too.”

“She has your number, but let me note it just in case,” Melody said.

Tomas hung up and exhaled, grateful. How could she explain why she was calling? “I just need to hear the senator’s voice?” That wouldn’t do. “I need to talk to her about guilt and absolution.” Two concepts in which she didn’t believe—could not, rationally, afford to believe in—but which, as she had discovered with Dennis and now Ephraim, could prove to be important.

Alicia had often complained that the certainty, not to say arrogance, that so suited Tomas to the practice of medicine was damn nigh unbearable. “I can’t live with somebody who’s always right and has never made a mistake!” Leaving had been Alicia’s choice, but Tomas had not questioned her own choices. Her personality was who she was, and what she needed. If it wasn’t what Alicia needed, well, that was Alicia’s loss.

Alicia had said that they shouldn’t be in touch, so they weren’t. Tomas had acceded to her wishes (for the first time, Alicia would say). Still, she was used to the woman crossing her mind at least every day, just as she had on long, busy days when they had been a couple, but hadn’t seen each other. Alicia complained that Tomas rarely “saw” her anyway, when she was right there. In fact Alicia’s chief function in Tomas’s life, then and afterward, seemed to have been as an archive of Tomas’s infinite wrongdoings. No wonder Tomas didn’t believe in guilt.

She stretched out on her bed although it was the middle of the afternoon. A thing she never did. Even in the years, and it was many years ago now, when she and Alicia had still had a satisfactory love life, Tomas never recalled going to bed in the afternoon. It was something missed out on in her youth, like wild parties or a sophomore slump.

It didn’t look like she was ever going to get a chance to make up for that sobriety. Trysts on diving holidays blurred together in her memory like the underwater sights. She hadn’t fought for Alicia when she left, because she hadn’t thought she should have to; it was beneath her dignity. Another way of saying she had wounds to lick. But no one else had yet uprooted Alicia from her consciousness. When she was kissing another woman, or drowning in another woman’s pleasure, it was just bodies slapping together, not something she would remember later as the best this or that she ever had. For all her impatience with Tomas, Alicia had grounded her, and without her, Tomas drifted like the seaweed, free but not belonging anywhere.

She awoke to the ring tone “The Entertainer.

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